How to Use Visited Places in Apple Maps

The Maps app for your iPhone’s got a new feature this year where it will automatically track locations you’ve been to if you give it permission. What that means is you get a library of visited places, which you can then go back to and explore – and remember where you went for that amazing coffee when you were on holiday last time.

To access your visited places, tap on your profile picture on the main Maps page and then go on to Places. From here, you’ll see a new option called Visited Places, and straight away you’re going to see the map zoom in to select some of the places you’ve been to recently. In fact, if I zoom out a little bit here, you’ll see all the places I’ve visited in the last month or so.

Now, what’s really nice here is that we can remember where we’ve been. We can go back to restaurants that we enjoyed – all those sorts of things – and it’s all happening automatically on device. This data is not being sent to third parties or being sold or used to track you. It’s just on your iCloud account, locked down.

So, let’s have a look at how we can filter this data. I’m going to go on to the Cities first of all, and I can choose any city that has recorded places in it. So, I’ll tap on Copenhagen, and here you’ll see it’s going to zoom in and show me the places I visited during a trip there last month. Of course, I can tap onto any of these locations to zoom right in to get website details, any notes that I made – all those sorts of things.

Let’s come back from there slightly, and this time we’ll go to the Categories screen. Now, the categories will appear automatically as you start visiting places that belong in those categories. So, you may not see all of these at first – in fact, there’ll probably be more that I haven’t unlocked yet.

If I go to Transport, for example, it’s going to mark airports, train stations, all those sorts of places I’ve been to on my travels. And we can even filter this data down to find exactly what we’re looking for. So actually, if I wanted to look for September this year, I can tap onto the Date option and choose the exact month and year that I want to look for.

I think as this library of places grows over the next 12 months, this will be a really useful feature to go back and remember when I visited certain places.

Finally, if we go back to the main Visited Places screen, we can scroll down and see a list of everywhere we’ve been. But there will probably be occasions when it’s marked the wrong location – perhaps there are several buildings close together, or you’re in an office block with lots of different floors and shops, whatever it might be.

So, we can actually change the location if we need to. Simply tap on the three dots – the options button – next to the location that’s been listed. From here, you can tap onto Wrong Location. Apple Maps is then going to find about 20 or 30 places that were close to that location, and hopefully the right option will be there for you. And if it isn’t, you can simply swipe sideways and delete the entry entirely.

And so that’s Visited Places – your own personal database of locations that you’ve been to, stored in the Maps app on your iPhone. And if you want to see what else your phone can do that perhaps you didn’t realise, maybe there are some secret features that you don’t know about, do check out my YouTube channel down below. There are hundreds of iPhone QuickTips there, and make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any in the future.

That’s it – I’ll see you next time.